Watching ABS-CBN on TV can be perilous, in many, many ways. At home, it is enough cause to risk fragile bones in a dive between TV set and underaged nieces even on prime time, in a bid to censor unexpected swerves from wholesome to pornographic.
Channel 2 in millions of Filipino homes, ABS CBN has become most salacious in local media history. It’s daily, early evening news program, at least the national version (I heard there’s a Kapampangan segment uploaded by some local cable firms) runs along the vein of a newly emerged cheap tabloid still thirsting for patronage and thus highlighting anything that can heat up the sexual appetite. For tabloids, they’re naked photos of women on front pages, and for ABS CBN news, despite its being already top rating, an inevitable climax into “paseksihan” or things “mapangahas” often involving starlets.
Also, do ABS CBN’s drama series, seldom prologued with any warning to parents to keep their children elsewhere but in front of the TV, really have to be laced with brutal rape or highly sexually suggestive scenes? Thousands of parents squirm in discomfort whenever trailers of such series wedge into a show they’d otherwise allow their kids to view.
A friend has again minimized watching Channel 2 since it started to unexpectedly flash trailers of its new drama series Eva Fonda. Half of the trailer shows nothing but brutal raping that triggers parental fear of being confronted by kids for some explanation on what the screaming and funny struggle between man and woman were all about.
Again, do drama series have to be peppered with explicit sexual scenes to be patronized by televiewers? Then and now, I watch Korean drama series on local TV. It’s a delight to realize they are wholesome. Even more significantly, they appeal to Filipino audiences, so that television stations, including ABS CBN, has taken to importing more and more of them for local audiences.
If wholesome series become favorites regardless of audience age category, why does ABS CBN keep on baring women and, lately, even men on its drama and news programs? Mystery.
Well, there’s rightful praise for the station for its Bantay Bata, for the bags of goodies it distributes to the poorest during Christmas holidays and to victims of natural calamities even in the farthest areas of the country, and for other similar saintly things. There is no doubt such undertakings should be lauded.
But how reconcile the good done to a relatively fewer folk compared to the millions of minds, especially juvenile minds, ABS CBN influences with its risqué, if not pornographic programming? Considering surveys indicating Channel 2 as the most watched nationwide and how Filipino families have become addicted to their TV sets, Channel 2 is the country’s primary source of “education”. Not even school teachers can compete with the visual impact of television on the psyche of people, especially the children.
Al fresco near a squatters area in Barangay Lakandula in Mabalacat, you’d see girls, some as young as three, pulling up their tattered shirts and gyrating their hips in imitation of the “paseksihan” episodes in the daily news they watch. Why, I once saw a little boy also doing that, his lips rouged, with a declaration he also wanted to land being shown on news that way.
These street manifestations, dear Facunda, are mere hints of how ABS CBN has shaped the minds and directed the ambitions of the countless children who watch Channel 2. Bombarded daily with television programs that extol nudity and nude performances as worth being the highlight of any news, as well as with drama series unfolding various forms of sexual passion as a matter of course, there’s a predictable national future. And it’s bleak.
Channel 2 in millions of Filipino homes, ABS CBN has become most salacious in local media history. It’s daily, early evening news program, at least the national version (I heard there’s a Kapampangan segment uploaded by some local cable firms) runs along the vein of a newly emerged cheap tabloid still thirsting for patronage and thus highlighting anything that can heat up the sexual appetite. For tabloids, they’re naked photos of women on front pages, and for ABS CBN news, despite its being already top rating, an inevitable climax into “paseksihan” or things “mapangahas” often involving starlets.
Also, do ABS CBN’s drama series, seldom prologued with any warning to parents to keep their children elsewhere but in front of the TV, really have to be laced with brutal rape or highly sexually suggestive scenes? Thousands of parents squirm in discomfort whenever trailers of such series wedge into a show they’d otherwise allow their kids to view.
A friend has again minimized watching Channel 2 since it started to unexpectedly flash trailers of its new drama series Eva Fonda. Half of the trailer shows nothing but brutal raping that triggers parental fear of being confronted by kids for some explanation on what the screaming and funny struggle between man and woman were all about.
Again, do drama series have to be peppered with explicit sexual scenes to be patronized by televiewers? Then and now, I watch Korean drama series on local TV. It’s a delight to realize they are wholesome. Even more significantly, they appeal to Filipino audiences, so that television stations, including ABS CBN, has taken to importing more and more of them for local audiences.
If wholesome series become favorites regardless of audience age category, why does ABS CBN keep on baring women and, lately, even men on its drama and news programs? Mystery.
Well, there’s rightful praise for the station for its Bantay Bata, for the bags of goodies it distributes to the poorest during Christmas holidays and to victims of natural calamities even in the farthest areas of the country, and for other similar saintly things. There is no doubt such undertakings should be lauded.
But how reconcile the good done to a relatively fewer folk compared to the millions of minds, especially juvenile minds, ABS CBN influences with its risqué, if not pornographic programming? Considering surveys indicating Channel 2 as the most watched nationwide and how Filipino families have become addicted to their TV sets, Channel 2 is the country’s primary source of “education”. Not even school teachers can compete with the visual impact of television on the psyche of people, especially the children.
Al fresco near a squatters area in Barangay Lakandula in Mabalacat, you’d see girls, some as young as three, pulling up their tattered shirts and gyrating their hips in imitation of the “paseksihan” episodes in the daily news they watch. Why, I once saw a little boy also doing that, his lips rouged, with a declaration he also wanted to land being shown on news that way.
These street manifestations, dear Facunda, are mere hints of how ABS CBN has shaped the minds and directed the ambitions of the countless children who watch Channel 2. Bombarded daily with television programs that extol nudity and nude performances as worth being the highlight of any news, as well as with drama series unfolding various forms of sexual passion as a matter of course, there’s a predictable national future. And it’s bleak.
